Migrating to a cloud model would reduce costs and let me focus on consumption pricing; reduce complexity by moving backend software and hardware support to the provider; and increase agility by letting my developers use all those nifty new tools that were emerging daily from cloud providers. The data center was heading the way of the dinosaurs! All was good. Everyone was happy. Well, in theory anyway. Until reality kicked in.
For many data center professionals, the daily operations of a data center require a lot of repetitive manual data entry tasks. Manually entering data about data center assets over and over again is not only time-consuming, but it risks inaccurate information due to human error. However, there is a new way forward.
As a global leader in second-generation Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, we have the opportunity to speak with a lot of data center professionals. One of the most common stories we hear is that they are still using Excel, Visio, open-source software, and homegrown tools to manage their data centers and that these tools are causing them a lot of pain. They're manually intensive, inaccurate, hard to use, and not integrated.
The direction of travel for business technology is one-way. The momentum towards strategies around decentralised, hybrid technologies is unstoppable. Examples abound, from the composable software stacks of e-commerce to the ongoing death of monolithic ERP. Modern, digitally-driven business is based on a dynamic alignment of resources, data and technology at the granular level, which is then coordinated precisely.
Did you know that the data center industry accounts for 3% of global electricity consumption and is expected to hit 4% by 2030? Due to rising energy costs and increased public pressure around the environmental impact of data centers, many of today’s organizations have launched corporate sustainability initiatives and data center professionals are cracking down on energy usage to support those goals.
Data center professionals have reached a breaking point. Data center infrastructure has grown too complex and distributed to manage with legacy tools like Excel, Visio, and homegrown systems. Manually updating multiple spreadsheets and diagrams for every change in the data center takes too much time and the information is too inaccurate to trust.
It is a rare pleasure to both have ones cake and eat it. But that is precisely what next generation, hybrid cloud, offers organisations looking to reduce the cost whilst increasing control of the technology that underpins modern, digital business. Hybrid cloud refers to mixed computing, storage, and services environments that blend on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud.
Data center management traditionally requires a lot of manual effort, and the same data often must be entered into multiple disparate systems. Not only does this waste time, but it leads to inaccurate data due to human error.
